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The project is a collaboration between the American Idea Foundation, which Ryan founded in 2019, and Digital Asset, which runs a blockchain called Canton that Ryan hopes will be used to facilitate the benefits for the program, which is called the Resources for Independence, Stability, and Employment Pilot Benefit Distribution program, or RISE program.

The key to the idea is to have states, sometimes called the laboratories of democracy, experiment in rationalizing the complicated safety net, which at the federal level includes different benefit programs for food, shelter, healthcare, and cash assistance.

The reform is meant to address several problems that conservatives see with the current welfare system, especially that it keeps people in a cycle of government dependency, rather than incentivizing beneficiaries to move into the workforce. It is also meant to address marriage penalties embedded in the web of social programs, as well as waste and fraud.

Ryan said he sees the pilots as a way to test how to better and more efficiently provide benefits for those truly needing welfare, while moving families out of the welfare system by encouraging upward mobility in the workforce, long a goal for Republicans.

Ryan said the idea has been years in the making. The goal is for the RISE programs to launch in three states in the first quarter of 2027 to test how the system would work. The former speaker said his group is “working very closely with some states.”

How it would work

The program would work by having states take over the administration of several major benefits. That would include food stamps, energy assistance, cash welfare, and more. It could even include child tax credits and Medicaid, although that would take more administrative maneuvering and cooperation with the federal government.

With the RISE program, multiple benefits could be lumped into monthly or twice-monthly payments, with benefit levels automatically adjusted given changes in household income levels and as family members enter the workforce.

That would dramatically simplify the social safety net process, Ryan said, by combining all the separate eligibility requirements, payment schedules, reporting processes, and benefit phase-outs that apply to existing programs.

It would also remove features of the existing welfare system that discourage work, Ryan said. Most notably, it could end “benefit cliffs” that apply when a welfare recipient gets a raise or starts earning more money from their job, crosses a set eligibility threshold, and then loses benefits, leaving them no better off, or even worse off, financially. For example, a low-wage worker might turn down a promotion if it would mean becoming ineligible for housing assistance.

The new structure would also eliminate “marriage penalties,” which occur when people might avoid getting married because their combined incomes could be reduced or eliminated.

The use of blockchain technology

The RISE Program envisions accomplishing the smooth handling of families in the pilot program through blockchain technology provided by Digital Asset.

“The reason I’m so excited about this now is because we finally have the technology that we’ve always dreamt of having, that can solve a lot of these problems,” Ryan added.

The Canton blockchain would differ from traditional public blockchains, where transactions are visible across the network, according to a white paper on the proposal. Canton is designed to give “selective, permissioned access to transaction data, allowing states to preserve privacy while coordinating benefit administration across their authorized agencies, providers, and partners.”

“A safety-net benefit could be delivered through a properly regulated, privacy-protected, technology tool that operates similarly to debit cards,” the white paper reads. “Unlike current EBT cards, this technology could be a programmable benefit that is distributed quickly, reconciled automatically, and designed with clear rules for eligible uses and phased benefit reductions.

“This technology would also be able to verify that recipients are meeting conditions of participation — such as employment, training, education, child-support cooperation, and case-management requirements,” the paper adds.

Ryan’s motivations

Ryan described the RISE program as a “passion project.” He said the proposal doesn’t necessarily mark a return to politics for him, but rather is a novel way to tackle welfare reform using new technology.

“It’s not a foray back into politics, but it’s a continuation in policy,” Ryan said.  “And given what I do in my vocational portfolio, which is my foundation, the think tanks, and the universities I affiliate with — we’ve been working on this issue all along, and this has been a passion project my entire adult life, including my congressional career.”

Ryan said he eventually wants to see a similar program scaled nationally as a follow-up to the welfare reform law of 1996. That law significantly overhauled cash welfare and shifted federal government support more toward in-kind benefits, such as food stamps.

“For successful poverty alleviation and welfare reform, it inevitably requires conditioning benefits for things like work and education, child care, and removing the barriers that penalize people for making more money and getting themselves out of poverty, namely the benefit cliffs,” Ryan said. “Technology now can solve that problem.”

Ryan said that a key will be having the pilot programs provide a sufficiently large sample size to run a randomized controlled trial. His group is working with Notre Dame and its poverty lab on the details right now.

“So we’re building statistically significant pilot projects so that we can measure and test their effectiveness, and each state can tweak it in their own way to customize it to fit their state,” he explained.

Another benefit of doing welfare through a simplified and unified blockchain-based system would be essentially eliminating the potential for waste, fraud, and abuse of the welfare system, Ryan said.

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He said that, importantly, the program could have phase-outs in a way that a person will never be penalized for earning more in the actual workforce.

“So you can put a formula that integrates with all of these benefits, so that if a person in poverty gets an opportunity like a raise or second job or a new job, they will never be disincentivized from taking that step out of poverty because they lose more benefits than they gain in income,” Ryan said.